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Supposing we accept this view and hold that, while things
below the moon's orb have merely type-persistence, the celestial
realm and all its several members possess individual eternity; it
remains to show how this strict permanence of the individual
identity- the actual item eternally unchangeable- can belong to
what is certainly corporeal, seeing that bodily substance is
characteristically a thing of flux.
The theory of bodily flux is held by Plato no less than by the
other philosophers who have dealt with physical matters, and is
applied not only to ordinary bodies but to those, also, of the
heavenly sphere.
"How," he asks, "can these corporeal and visible entities
continue eternally unchanged in identity?"- evidently agreeing,
in this matter also, with Herakleitos who maintained that even
the sun is perpetually coming anew into being. To Aristotle there
would be no problem; it is only accepting his theories of a
fifth-substance.
But to those who reject Aristotle's Quintessence and hold the
material mass of the heavens to consist of the elements
underlying the living things of this sphere, how is individual
permanence possible? And the difficulty is still greater for the
parts, for the sun and the heavenly bodies.
Every living thing is a combination of soul and body-kind: the
celestial sphere, therefore, if it is to be everlasting as an
individual entity must be so in virtue either of both these
constituents or of one of them, by the combination of soul and
body or by soul only or by body only.
Of course anyone that holds body to be incorruptible secures the
desired permanence at once; no need, then, to call on a soul or
on any perdurable conjunction to account for the continued
maintenance of a living being.
But the case is different when one holds that body is, of itself,
perishable and that Soul is the principle of permanence: this
view obliges us to the proof that the character of body is not in
itself fatal either to the coherence or to the lasting stability
which are imperative: it must be shown that the two elements of
the union envisaged are not inevitably hostile, but that on the
contrary [in the heavens] even Matter must conduce to the scheme
of the standing result.
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